System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz HT S478 Northwood CP (800FSB)
- Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT S478 Northwood CPU (533FSB)
- AMD Barton XP3000+ S462 CPU
- Intel 875BZ Canterwood motherboard (P03 BIOS)
- ABIT BH7 i845PE run at 533FSB and 800FSB
- MSI Granite Bay GNB-MAX2-L run at 533FSB
- ABIT NF7-S v1.1 (16 BIOS)
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9800 Pro (380/340)
- 2 x 256MB Kingmax PC3200 run at 2.5-6-3-2 @ DDR-400 and 2-6-2-3 @ DDR-266
- 2 x 256MB Mushkin PC3500 run at 2-6-2-2 at DDR333 and DDR-400 for BH7, NF7-S, and GNB-MAX2-L
- 41.5GB IBM 120GXP Hard Drive
- 2 x 120GB Seagate ST3120023AS S-ATA drives with 8MB cache
- Liteon 16x DVD
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- Samsung 181T TFT monitor
- Sony 16x DVD
- Cooler Master Fujiyama heatpipe cooler
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- DirectX9
- Intel 5.00.1009 chipset drivers
- Intel Application Accelerator 3.0 RAID Edition
- NVIDIA nForce 2.03 drivers
- ATI CATALYST 3.2 drivers and control panel (6307s)
- Pifast v41 to 10m places
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
- Hexus SETI benchmark
- HD Tach 2.63
- ATTO Disk Benchmark v1.63
- 3DMark 2001SE
- UT2003 Demo (Build 2206)
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30 HQ
Notes and issues
3 CPUs and 4 motherboards make for some interesting performance comparisons. The i875BZ will be run against its peers in the following combination
3GHz / 200FSB / dual channel DDR-400 memory at 2.5-6-2-3 timings (tRCD = 3)
3.06GHz / 133FSB / dual channel DDR-266 at 2-6-2-3 timings, to compare against the present Granite Bay
Interestingly, Intel bundled 2 sticks of Kingmax PC3200 memory with the i875BZ. The strange aspect was that these two modules, when run together, were consistently 1 - 1.5% faster than 2 x 256MB Mushkin PC3500 modules at the same memory timings. The motherboard refused to run in dual channel mode with a tRCD of 2 clocks, even using Mushkin PC3500 memory at DDR-266 speeds; strange. It simply refused to boot. The lack of voltage adjustment ensured that 2-6-2-3 were the best usable timings at DDR-266 and 2.5-6-2-3 at DDR-400.
Further, the i875BZ will be compared to an i845PE (single channel) motherboard running at both 3.06GHz / 133FSB / 166MHz memory and 3GHz / 200FSB / 200MHz memory. The ABIT BH7 has shown itself to run flawlessly at 200FSB, thereby supporting the newer 200FSB CPUs.
An MSI Granite-Bay motherboard (GNB MAX2-L) will be used at 3.06GHz / 133FSB / dual channel DDR-266 memory with 2-6-2-2 timings.
Lastly, AMD's Barton XP3000+ will be paired with an nForce2 motherboard in dual channel DDR333 mode (2-6-2-2 timings).
This should give us some idea of where the Canterwood stands with respect to performance. Remember that the 200FSB CPU is running at exactly 3GHz, 60MHz slower than the 3.06GHz / 133FSB version, but the increased bandwidth should allow it to beat out the faster CPU in the majority of benchmarks. Hopefully, the retail motherboards should allow voltage adjustments, so tighter timings can be run at 200FSB speeds.
Stability was excellent through a week of testing. The motherboard ran 4 256MB sticks of PC3500 memory without issue. The only stumbling block came when installing the Gigabit Ethernet drivers. Running off the pre-supplied Intel Express Driver CD, installation of chipset drivers and utilities was smooth. However the Gigabit LAN refused to install correctly. This, though, was rectified with a newer BIOS. With a limited overclocking BIOS, there was little way in gauging the FSB limit of this particular motherboard.
